Advertisement

The View | A zero-sum race for rare earth metals will only set back the shift towards renewable energy

  • The US leads a group of major economies now determined to break China’s grip on resources vital to a green transition
  • While efforts to diversify the supply chain are understandable, without cooperation, the battle for control may lead to unfair and unsustainable practices

Reading Time:3 minutes
Why you can trust SCMP
4
Bags of rare earth concentrates are ready for transport to China for processing, at the Mountain Pass mine operated by MP Materials of California in 2019. China dominates the downstream processing stages of several critical minerals mined elsewhere. Photo: Bloomberg
The UN-led COP27 climate conference in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, took place against a backdrop of unprecedentedly high energy prices and looming shortages of certain critical metals vital for scaling up renewable energy, such as copper, cobalt, graphite, lithium, nickel and rare earth metals.

Although some of these metals, which are also crucial for hi-tech manufacturing, are known to be abundant globally, the establishment of new mines and mineral extraction is itself a carbon-intensive process.

Against this background, countries are faced with the challenge of ensuring energy security amid a green transition, that is, ensuring a reliable energy supply at an affordable cost with minimal environmental impact.

The best policy to promote global green energy security would be for all countries – especially the big powers China and the US – to agree to revert to a rules-based multilateral system promoted and safeguarded by the World Trade Organization.

In such a scenario, countries would agree to promote global knowledge-sharing around affordable green technologies, sustainable environmental and ethical standards in the mining and processing of green metals, global resource governance, and sharing of geoscience data.

Unfortunately, the Ukraine war and heightened US-China tensions appear to have made this option unworkable for the near term.

Advertisement